Casey Chan

In an interview with AllThingsD, Eric Schmidt answered a fun question from the audience: If he had to be CEO again, would he choose Apple, Amazon or Facebook? Schmidt chose Apple. He also dissed Microsoft and keeps mentioning Facebook's billion users.

His first answer to the CEO question was a very smooth political sidestepping of the question:

I was on Apple board, and I'll always have a soft spot for them. I was very good friends and very close to Steve Jobs, and we miss him dearly. Jeff Bezos has made remarkable moves. And again, Facebook has a billion users.

But when pressed he admitted that he would go with Apple because it had the most cash. Completely and totally reasonable! In the rest of the interview—which is definitely worth a read—Schmidt took some shots at Microsoft, saying Microsoft Surface would "mean a lot if the product works" and that Apple "should have kept [Google] maps" and that self-driving cars are a lot of fun.

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Schmidt is also keenly aware of Facebook's billion users as he mentions it multiple times though he's also deeply proud of how successful Android has been, saying that there are "four times more Android phones than Apple phones. 500 million phones already in use. Doing 1.3 million activations a day. We'll be at 1 billion mobile devices in a year." Hot damn that's a lot. Read the whole interview at AllThingsD. [AllThingsD]